Moderates United

Socialism is at root an emotional search for a community which the very intellectualism and following unprocessed emotion that gave rise to the idea, make impossible.  No connections are made.  Whenever and wherever Communists succeed, people become objects.  The objectification of humanity, the reduction of every person to a 1) price in Capitalism or 2) use in Socialism, is simultaneously precisely what they claim to want to avoid, and the necessary consequence of their perceptual failures, their unrecognized and unchallenged manias and delusions.

What would appeal to you more: 1) living in a hut with a dirt floor with people with whom you are deeply emotionally connected, doing work which has intrinsic meaning and feeling to you, and surrounded in a small village with like-minded people who share some sort of belief and ritual system that allows the regular expression of emotion, of joy, of celebration; 2) living in an efficiently designed, energy conserving gray home, by yourself, and plugging yourself daily into a slot in a machine?  Can there be a debate?

I read once on a bathroom stall that “Socialism is the opiate of the intellectuals”.  If I take that at face value, what I find is that the IDEA serves to deaden emotional pain.  It places the eventual release of primitive emotions some time in the future, where there is this ill defined–because laughably unrealistic–place and way of being in which that person can be free, where they can freely exchange love and affection, where there is no large scale grief and pain, where living is easy.

All the actual things socialists want can be had within Capitalism.  In fact, that is the ONLY way they can get them.  But the entire project of actually improving humanity, of improving society, depends upon the individual work of learning to see things as they are, of knowing ourselves, of deciphering our true needs and desires, and of understanding that nothing worthwhile is built overnight, and that what is built overnight–particularly using the violence which is the default mode of utopians–is not worthwhile.

I might summarize this by noting that no one can run forever.

To grow qualitatively, to reach the next valence shell, you have to cease to exist.  “You” disappears, and a new “you” appears.  Most people cannot deal with this.  That is why they get stuck.  There is nothing in the middle.  You have to accept this nothing.

Specifically, what I see is that my identity is closely tied to conflict.  Certainly, I have often sought out conflict with other people, but what I most have in mind is this sense of internal conflict.  In my particular case, although I think this is likely common, I self sabotage because to do otherwise would force me into a confrontation with this Void, with a non-self.

When I make plans, my pattern is to disrupt them.  That is what my family did.  But I see that even within my own internal psycho-ecology, if I might coin a term new to me at least, what self disruption serves to do is prevent the emergence of smooth waters which would show me “I” don’t exist.

Within my Kum Nye practice, they say one of the common effects of falling into a very deep, profound relaxing state is for some part of our self to activate and throw out a surge of thinking, to fill the deep empty spaces with SOMETHING.  The task, of course, is to persevere.

When you are doing qualitative work with your self, you can only grow as far as the number of times you are willing to die, and how much you are willing to die.

But here is the thing: “you” were never there to begin with.  “You” are a habit, an abstraction.  This is my understanding of what the Buddha taught.

The value of learning to connect with feeling and sensation, which is the practice of Kum Nye, is that something is still there where “you” cease to exist, and if your mind can accept this continuity it can let go.  If it lets go, you can accomplish much.

It is not uncommon for me to feel traces of something much larger.  I suppose this is mystical in a way.  None of it can be spoken.  But it is all very interesting.  And open to all.

And I breathed.  I am half sponge, and I can fill myself with and feel atmospheres.

What I felt was that all the difference and identity was an inch deep.  I felt like if I pushed most of these people they would lapse into an innate neuroticism and deep anxiety.

“Who are you?” is one of the most basic questions you can ask of yourself, and of others.  “Someone who has a nice beard and listens to musicians no one has heard of” is not a very good identity.  When I ask of myself and others “who are you”, what I want to know is what I, or they, are willing to fight for.  What are you willing to die for?  Suffer for?

And I felt this demonic voice present in the background.  It did not speak loudly, because it did not–does not–need to.  What it offered was comfort and shelter and strength and power.  All you have to do is join the cult, to join the headless ones.  All you have to do is turn your brain off, and accept at face value all the news you are given by approved outlets, and feel the appropriate emotions when you are told to feel.  Feel sad when you are supposed to feel sad, and angry the rest of the time.

All of this seems magical, like some sort of thing that would exist in a book and not in the real world.  Spells are not cast in our empirically minded world, are they?

Of course they are.  Daily, and often.

Unless you feel you are often fighting off spiderwebs, and pulling back curtains, you have likely accepted a manufactured truth, and more likely, many.  Up is down anymore.  Gravity exists in the real world, but not in our psyches.

E+i=MC squared, plus i, where i equals information, but I suppose it may be interesting to substitute “consciousness”.  My gut intuition tells me this is the bridge between the big and the small; between the falsified general narrative of General Relativity, and the still extant narrative of Quantum Physics; between the three fields which have been unified, and gravity.

I have no basis for this claim.  I am not a professional.  I don’t even understand calculus.  But this is what I feel.

I will add, too, that I was driving the other day and it hit me that creativity always involves the body.  Even in purely abstract disciplines like math and physics, GENUINE newness always has an emotional component, perhaps an agonistic component, or perhaps comforting and palliative component.  But interaction with the OUT THERE via the body is always necessary for genuine creations of the mind.  No true creation is possible in the purely abstract.  It only appears that way once it has come into being, been digested, and properly presented as if it had no passion behind it at all.

Be that as it may, I’m looking up so and so, and that person, oh and her–Ph.D, good on her–etc. I’m quite sure my high school hasn’t the faintest idea how to find me, so I haven’t been invited, ever, and I doubt very much I would go if I were.  All my friends were in classes above me.

Most of my friends have been very successful: I count a software company founder, a professor, a high-up-the-corporate-ladder, and an investment banker, none of whom I have spoken to in many years.

And I think to myself, for the umpteenth time: what is wrong with you?  I have a high I.Q.  I was a National Merit Scholar.  All I had to do was stay in my head, play the nerd game, carry it through to a Masters or Ph.D in some egghead field–and Humanities is fine, if you are on board politically–and build a life around that.

And I could have done that.   And I would have gotten to the end of my life never knowing myself.  I would have wondered all my life why I could never fully relax, why I was on edge, why I was irritable.  There would have been nothing in the way of me pushing people away from me forever.  I could have lived happily–relatively speaking–in my head.

Without knowing why, I have consistently thrown myself into things for which I was congenitally–or habitually–unsuited, with Sales being the most obvious example. I have turned into a competent sales person, but I would never have thought that in a million years.  I am a competent tradesman.  I also never would have thought that.

What I think I felt is that if you are overbalanced in one area, it is important to do something else.  And I did that.  I have done that.

My head tells me, because my heart doubts me, that a life spent pursuing personal growth, self knowledge, is a life spent well.  I look outside my window, though, and this seems to be a rare sentiment.  I am keenly aware that I am different, that my decisions do not and have not followed the normal flow chart.

Just in the last few days have I contacted, finally, an energy within me which wishes me well.  So much of my life has been spent dodging arrows and sling bullets that I have been firing at myself, lest someone else do it.

I may wind up in a shack in my last years, but I hope when it comes my time to die, I will not have to lie when I say to myself I did my best to become the best I was capable of becoming.  I have looked myself in the eyes and unhesitatingly told the truth.  This trauma–the puzzle of my past and more importantly what to do about it–has been an extraordinarily complicated problem to solve, but I have nearly solved it.

I can feel peace just over the next hilltop.  That is all I’ve ever truly wanted.  People who have not breathed hellfire likely cannot understand this.

I have also long said that my biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and realizing I lived someone else’s life.  I say this mostly in earnest.  This is a big issue for the children of narcissists.  It can take a very long time to figure out where to set boundaries, and where you end and everything else and everyone else begins.

But even for the children of healthy parents, I think it is common to get sucked into whirlpools of various sorts.  To live authentically, all of us have to endure at least moments of feeling crazy, because as far as we know, we are the only people on the planet thinking x, y, or z.  For most things, this illusion is quickly dispelled, because most varieties of crazy are actually quite common, normal, and healthy.

For others of us, not so much.  I am going back and forth with an economist at present on my ideas, and he seems not able to wrap his head around seeing the trees in a new way.  Trying to convince professional economists to think new thoughts, and failing, and failing repeatedly, is just not a problem most people have.  Actually, though, to tell the truth, I like that problem.  It’s an interesting challenge.

The gestalt, the Ursprung, from which all this flows, though, is quite unique, and I find being ignored vastly preferable to being misunderstood, particularly by earnest people, but being ignored has its cost too.

Woe is me, woe is me!!!!  It must be time for bed.  Nothing wrong with me a good night’s sleep won’t fix.  Sleep: the Reset button for life.

Being me, of course, I got to wondering what it means to “take refuge”.  I think of Bobbie Zimmerman’s (Bob Dylan’s naked name, perhaps?) song “Shelter from the Storm“.  I think of the Buddhist practice of taking refuge in the “3 Jewels”: The Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.”  And I don’t think it is taking it too far to say that the 12 Steps is a “taking refuge”.  It is taking refuge in what amounts to a Dharma and a Sangha.

And I think the question is this: what remains when you let your guard down?  What remains when you relax at the end of the day, open to all that you know is out there, even if only in principle, as you lie behind closed, locked doors in a safe place?  Is there something still there, watching over you kindly, like the loving mother you lacked?  Or something out there, standing guard against the forces of destruction, doubt and death in all its forms?  What will remain of the day before, in the day that comes after?  Will some patient force remain there, able and willing to help you rebuild what was torn apart and cast to the winds?

I feel here questions are enough.  I will leave it there.